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Users of SAP's BusinessObjects and Rapid Deployment products are now able to run the applications from Amazon's cloud, marking the first time SAP has worked to make its software available on a public cloud service.

The companies are announcing during the Sapphire conference on Wednesday that SAP has certified the products to run on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

While businesses already can use hosted SAP software, those offerings, from vendors including IBM, Verizon and Dell, are on hosted private clouds. "This is SAP's first public cloud foray," said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president of SAP's global ecosystem and channels group.

The companies plan to bring other SAP apps, including the popular enterprise resource planning landscapes, to AWS.

Existing and new customers of all sizes and in any region will be interested in the offering, the companies said. "It's a very compelling value proposition for our customers. From an agility standpoint, they have the ability to take a tier one app and rapidly deploy it," Ichhpurani said.

"There's nowhere else that customers can spin up and spin down SAP resources on demand with pay-as-you-go pricing," said Adam Selipsky, vice president of Amazon Web Services.

SAP plans to start working with system integrators that will help existing customers migrate from an on-premise scenario to AWS.

SAP worked closely with AWS to optimize the virtual instances on the computing, network and storage layers for the best performance, Ichhpurani said. Still, customers must make separate arrangements with SAP and AWS for the service, paying each company individually.

The companies have developed "best-in-class SLAs" to cover both the infrastructure service from AWS and the software, Selipsky said. However, they did not disclose details of the SLAs.

Amazon and SAP may have to work hard to promote the reliability of the offering to customers who may be wary following a recent multiday outage of Amazon's EC2 service. Other high-profile outages, including one that struck Microsoft's hosted Exchange service last week, have led to questions about how heavily enterprises should rely on cloud services.

AWS has similarly optimized other enterprise software to run on its services. For example, some Oracle software has been certified to run on Amazon's services.